Sir Sayyid was born on October 17, 1817, in Delhi, and died in Aligarh
in 1898. He was to witness the destruction of the power of the Marathas
and the Pindaris by the British, who would assure the first unitary rule
of India in almost a century. Sir Sayyid's years of growth and maximum
vigor and service -- both to the Raj and to the Muslims -- would perforce
be related to the main thrust of his age, the political process that would
remove the Moghuls from Delhi, and the proclamation of Queen Victoria as
Empress of India on January 1, 1858.

This major theme can be identified in the earliest days of Sir Sayyid's
life as a child born into "a Muslim family of high nobility."/1/
In his case, the earliest personal influences may have been decisive for
his entire career. Besides his impressive mother, there was his grandfather
Khwaja Farid-ud-Din who died when Sir Sayyid was still under 10, but whose
influence was so profound that Sir Sayyid returned to it for the subject
of his final book in 1896. Khwaja Farid-ud-Din, his maternal grandfather,
served the British in several important assignments: as superintendent
in 1791 of the Calcutta Madrassa, then after 1799 as attache with British
diplomatic missions in Iran and, finally, from 1815 to his death in 1826,
as Prime Minister in the Court of the Moghul Emperor, Akbar Shah II. He
was responsible for the revenues of the two nearby districts of Delhi and
Hissar, which the British had given the Emperor as his private domain.

Sir Sayyid was to learn much of importance at the residence of his maternal
grandfather. There he saw as a constant visitor and family confidant the
Boston­born Major-General David Ochterlony, the conqueror of Nepal
and British Resident in Delhi. Sir Sayyid's final book, in fact, gives
us a picture of himself as a young child sitting on Ochterlony's knee and
asking questions about the gold buttons on the Major-General's full-dress
uniform./2/ By any analysis,
the combination of his mother, his grandfather, and Ochterlony formed a
set of positive personal influences that would affect Sir Sayyid's political
thought in later years. The net result might perhaps be stated as conditioning
him to accept the reality of British power and to make the best of it.

Although generally overlooked, Mir Muttaqi, Sir Sayyid's father, also
contributed much to his growing son. On this side, however, the effect
was to balance the pro-British bias of the maternal side. The paternal
influences provided Sir Sayyid with his all-important social link as a
Sayyid with the Prophet Muhammad and Arabia, his personal access to the
Court as the son of the Emperor's close friend, and his spiritual conditioning
as the son of an intensely religious father who was the disciple of Shah
Ghulam Ali of Delhi, the founder of a Sufi brotherhood. It was thus not
in jest that Sir Sayyid once answered a question about his religion from
an English official by saying, "I am a Wahabi."/3/
We can, in fact, view Sir Sayyid's achievements as the creative result
of the contrary tensions that he was able to master and put to work for
his own good and that of the Muslims.

Sir Sayyid's sympathy for the militant anti-British reform movements
of his day is most strikingly seen in his great work on the monuments of
Delhi, the Asar al-Sanadid. It was first published in 1847 after
he had entered the services of the British East India Company as a minor
judicial functionary. This book was to make Sir Sayyid famous abroad, and
to secure his election in 1864 as an honorary Fellow of the Royal Asiatic
Society of London.

This fame came to Sir Sayyid by way of Paris. Garcin de Tassy, a French
scholar of Urdu, learned of the book and favorably reviewed it in the Journal
Asiatique (Nov.-Dec., 1856). De Tassy thought so much of the book by
the "eminent Muslim author" that he translated it for serial publication.
Its appearance in the post-Mutiny years of 1860-1861 coincided with de
Tassy's distress over the news that the British re-conquest of Delhi had
virtually destroyed the city. Nevertheless, the book was unusual for what
it omitted as well as for what it contained.

De Tassy made his translation from the second edition of 1854, and was
ignorant of the series of biographical sketches of famous persons who had
once lived in Delhi that had appeared in the first edition of 1847 as its
fourth chapter or section. (This missing section now appears in the recent
editions of Asar-at­Sanadid published in India and Pakistan.)
The explanation for Sir Sayyid's dropping this chapter appears to lie in
its impolitic eulogy on the life of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid, the reformer who
died in 1831 fighting the rule of the Sikhs. Sir Sayyid described the great
martyr as a man of superhuman capacity in bravery, in popular appeal, and
in his command of spiritual power. The biographical sketch concluded, moreover,
with a sharp thrust at Shahid's Afghan allies who betrayed him on the battlefield
for the price of Sikh gold. This aversion to the Afghans, or Pathans as
they are called in India, became a critical feature of Sir Sayyid's experience
in Bijnor during the Revolt.

Much in the general content of Asar-al-Sanadid is also important
to the general subject of Sir Sayyid and the Revolt. The reserve and rational
spirit that mark Sir Sayyid's treatment of the different monuments of Delhi
are particularly noteworthy. They appear close indeed to the "Protestant"
reformist spirit which Sir Sayyid, long after the Revolt, saw as a hallmark
of the so-called Wahabi Movement itself./4/
The monuments are described in simple statements that are free of hyperbole,
while disputed questions are objectively solved by reference to sources
or by actual on-the-spot investigation. Very candidly Sir Sayyid asserted
that a reknowned mosque in Delhi was built from the ruins of a Hindu temple,
or that the high quality of its mosaics proved that a "clever Italian"
must have been employed among the artisans who built the royal bath at
the Red Fort.

The puritan rational (or shall we say "Wahabi") streak is, on the other
hand, quite clearly evident. Sir Sayyid was thus sorry that the courts
of law had not yet banned a popular "mela" where the accent on pleasure
offended him. Equally evident is his practical sense of how to get on in
the world. Here and there in the work one finds, for example, exaggerated
praise for British cleanup campaigns in Delhi and the "extraordinary" railway
bridge which they built over a nearby river.

There is, finally, the relation between Sir Sayyid's choice of language
and his basic intellectual sympathies with the Islamic reform movements
of his day. Sayyid Ahmad Shahid and Mawlana Isma'il Shahid, leaders of
the religious reforms, had already chosen Urdu over Persian to reach to
wider audience, and Sir Sayyid likely chose to write Athar-al-Sanadid
in Urdu instead of Persian for the same reason. An established writer in
Persian, Sir Sayyid may also have been influenced to write in Urdu by Mirza
Ghalib, India's leading poet in Persian and Urdu and Sir Sayyid's intimate
in Delhi. In the years before the Mutiny, Ghalib had shifted from Persian
to a greater use of Urdu, particularly in his famous letters in colloquial
style. In any event, Shibli Nomani, a decisive figure in Muslim historiography
in India, has argued that Sir Sayyid was the direct beneficiary of Ghalib's
extension of the Urdu prose style./5/

Sir Sayyid's use of Urdu in his historical and religious works in turn
played a major role in projecting Urdu out of the subject matter of love
and courtship and into the arena of political, educational, moral, and
historical discourse and struggle. His Tarikh Sarkashiy-i Dhilla Bijnor
(History of the Revolt in Bijnor), which is the focus of this introduction,
was actually the first report of a contemporary event ever published in
Urdu./6/

A review of the local social and historical background of the Revolt
in Bijnor appears necessary in order to present the broader canvas against
which Sir Sayyid's intensely detailed history was written. Bijnor, just
40 miles from Meerut, formed part of the Rohilkhand Division of six districts
and the native state of Rampur. The chief city in this division was Bareilly
(the native city of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid), the center of disaffection in
the Revolt for the entire Division. The leading social group in Rohilkhand
at the time were the descendants of the Pathans, who had ruled Rohilkhand
in the first half of the 18th Century before their conquest by the combination
of Oudh, the Marathas, and the British. In 1801 the British East India
Company took over the entire Division to incorporate Rohilkhand into their
territories. The Pathans remained restive, however, and their resentment
and instability were described by Bishop Heber, who visited Rohilkhand
in the mid-1820's. He recorded his impression that "the people appear by
no means to have forgotten or forgiven their first injuries. The Mussulman
chiefs, who are numerous, are very angry at being without employment under
Government or hope of rising in the State or army and are continually breaking
out into acts of insubordination and violence"./7/
Bishop Heber was a good reporter, for serious disturbances did break out
in 1837 and 1842. Within three weeks of the Revolt in 1857 every regiment
in the Rohilkhand Division had rebelled, many Europeans had been murdered,
and Khan Bahadur Khan, a descendant of the national hero of the Rohillas,
had proclaimed himself Nawab or Viceroy in Bareilly of the Mughal King
of Delhi.

Rohilkhand was the only region in Northern India where the British were
routed during the Revolt. Again, while reading Sir Sayyid's pleas for help,
one should recall that the British had postponed their assault on Rohilkhand
purely for tactical reasons. To concentrate their strength advantageously,
they were obliged to give priority attention to the outbreaks in Oudh and
in Delhi itself. The campaign to retake Rohilkhand, when it came in April
1858, was easy. The British district officials returned to Bijnor for a
triumphal entry with the Hindu chiefs who had continued their struggle
against the Pathan rebels. The spectacle of this joint Anglo-Rajput return
to Bijnor was a detail which Sir Sayyid could not bring himself to record
in his own book./8/

Certain other aspects of the social situation also merit attention.
First, Rohilkhand and particularly Bijnor were highly urban. In 1847 when
the British conducted the first census, the total population of the district
was 620,552, and the average density was 325 per square mile. There were
415,570 Hindus and 204,982 Muslims [[in Bijnor]], about half of the total
population of the district. Of the inhabited towns and villages, all but
72 contained less than a thousand persons. Only 11 of those remaining had
populations exceeding 5,000; these towns were Nagina, Chandpur and Sherkot
(whose combined population exceeded 10,000), Bijnor, Seohara, Dhampur,
Nihtaur, Kiratpur, Mandawar, Jhalu, and Sahaspur. Their population was
99,275, or 16% of the total of Bijnor district.

The dominant community in these towns, moreover, was Muslim, particularly
of the Shikh, Sayyid, and Pathan classes. The countryside, however, was
dominated by zamindari holdings under the leadership of the great Hindu
landlords of Sherkot, Tajpur, and Haldaur. Numerically, however, the largest
single group was the Chamars, landless agricultural laborers and leather
workers. They played no part in the Revolt itself and were generally written
off in contemporary accounts as "deeply in debt and very he1p1ess."/9/
Certain other groups whose early response to the news of the revolt was
aggressive and whose influence in Indian politics was important included
the agricultural tribes, generally identified at the Jats, and the pastoral
Gujars (Ahirs)./10/ The Ahir
center in Bijnor at Mandawar is mentioned as an important center as far
back as the travel accounts of the Chinese pilgrims to India. Apparently,
for Sir Sayyid, the essential problem of district government concerned
the domination and use of the Jats and Gujars by the British Government
and its landlord and aristocratic allies.

In writing about the impact of the Revolt on Sir Sayyid, Hafeez Malik
described him as being "traumatized" into a "staunch Muslim Nationalist."/11/
Much in the record supports this judgment. Altaf Husain Hali, for example,
described Sir Sayyid as being so remorseful over the plight of the fallen
Muslims that he actually planned to leave the country. He reconsidered,
however, when he decided that to run away at such a critical hour would
be cowardly. Sir Sayyid went to Moradabad, another district of Rohilkhand,
in April, 1858, with a promotion as Principal Sadr Amin. In Moradabad,
he served as member of a special commission appointed to investigate the
disposition of properties seized from persons accused of disloyalty during
the Revolt. It was in Moradabad, too, that Sir Sayyid began to publish
his books and pamphlets on the Revolt and to take his first steps as an
educational and social reformer. Perhaps in this activity Sir Sayyid found
release from the personal tragedies that had wiped out his home in Delhi
and "turned him overnight into an old man with whitened hair." This appearance
of age, however, was deceptive, for Sir Sayyid had forty very active years
yet ahead of him.

Sir Sayyid's basic view of the Revolt was expressed in a memorandum
written in Urdu, Asbab-i Baghawat-i Hind (The Causes of the Indian
Revolt), and privately printed in 1858. Sir Sayyid sent almost the entire
printing of 500 copies to the Home Government in London, save for a few
copies he kept for himself and a single copy sent to the Government of
India in Calcutta. (For the English text of this memorandum see [[*the
1873 translation*]]) As summarized by Hali his general position was
that the Revolt had not been a national movement, nor had it resulted from
any plot. It had rather come about from the disobedience of soldiers who
had acted primarily out of ignorance or religious presuppositions and without
any determination to mutiny against the Government./12/

Despite evidence to the contrary (which eventually even British scholars
accepted) Sir Sayyid retained his views without modification. A decade
after the end of the Revolt Sir Sayyid visited Britain, where Sir John
Kay asked him to assess once again "the extent to which the Mutiny of 1857
grew into a popular rebellion in the N.W. Provinces." Sir Sayyid simply
reiterated his previous view that "even the use of the expression 'Military
Mutiny' conveys an idea of something more than the real fact." (For the
full text of this letter, see *Appendix C*.)

The remedy which Sir Sayyid recommended for India was the admission
of native Indians into the Legislative Council. Graham, his English biographer,
quoted Sir Sayyid's suggestion as follows: "I do not wish to enter into
the question as to how the ignorant and uneducated natives of Hindustan
could be allowed a share in the deliberations of the Legislative Council
or as to how they should be selected to form an assembly like the English
Parliament. These are knotty points. All I wish to prove here is that such
a step is not only advisable but absolutely necessary, and that the disturbances
were due to the neglect of such a measure."/13/

In Moradabad, meanwhile, events were again pushing Sir Sayyid out of
the courtroom into the public limelight. On July 28, 1859, he was the principal
speaker at a large thanksgiving ceremony offerred by the Muslims of Moradabad
to Queen Victoria for her generous proclamation of November 1, 1858. His
speech was so straightforward and effective that Hali records his own assessment
that the degradation and losses suffered by the Muslims as the result of
the Revolt had planted such deep concern in Sir Sayyid that he could not
allow himself even a moment's respite. It may be worthwhile to sample here
this concern of Sir Sayyid as he thanked God in public for having induced
the British to be merciful. "Oh, God!" Sir Sayyid declared, "the times
just passed away have been very eventful to Thy creatures. Neither man
nor dumb cattle, the beasts of the fields, nor the fowls of the air, nay,
nor even the inanimate trees and rocks that cover the face of the earth,
have enjoyed peace and quiet. No man was assured of life, property, or
his honor. The late disturbances tossed heaven and earth into confusion.
In Thy merciful kindness Thou has put away from us, Oh God, the evils and
calamities of the revolt. Oh, God! Thou hast renewed Thy mercy toward Thy
helpless servants and hast restored to us the peace and comfort Thy servants
enjoyed through Thy grace in the days preceding the disastrous disturbance."
(For the full text of this prayer see *Appendix B*.)

Clearly, Sir Sayyid was speaking the same thoughts in the public prayer
that he had used to conclude the book he was then publishing on the Revolt.

Sir Sayyid also took a step forward in educational reform in Moradabad.
He organized a committee to manage a small Persian-language school, which
later was merged into the larger tehsil school established by John Strachey,
who came to Moradabad at this time as its new Collector. Small as the venture
may have been, Sir Sayyid had something of broad significance in mind.
With the blessing and encouragement of the British officials, he strove
to encourage the "wealthy and respectable" of both Hindu and Muslim communities
to send their sons to a public school. To underscore his case, Sir Sayyid
placed his own son (Sayyid Mahmud) in the school, and paid for the costs
of two of the four scholarships being offered. At the public examination
on January 1, 1860, Sir Sayyid asked the town elite to "think of the Hindee
patshalas of a former age, and read the history of the Muhammadans, and
you will find that high dignitaries regarded the education of their youth
in large public schools as a great honor; assuredly it is so, for all the
eminent pundits and moulvees who have lived before us or who are
now living, and whom all you great men hold in high esteem and respect,
all received their education, and acquired their profound learning, at
public schools, and not at their own homes."/14/

Sir Sayyid continued his active and public interest in education. He
published, for example, an objection against the proposed expansion of
Government vernacular schools. Sir Sayyid had apparently not forgotten
in Moradabad the advantage Pandit Radha Kishan enjoyed over him during
the Revolt because of his facility in English. His boldest ventures in
educational reform, however, took place after his transfer to Ghazipur
in 1862. Here he established the Translation Society that was later to
evolve into the Scientific Society of Aligarh, certainly a clear stage
on the way to events too far from the Revolt to be covered here. Instead,
we shall close with a review of an important speech in Persian which Sir
Sayyid delivered at a meeting of the Muhammadan Literary Society in Calcutta
on October 6, 1863.

Sir Sayyid was very much under the impact of the Revolt as he appealed
to this Calcutta Muslim audience to support his scheme for a curriculum
that would join together English and modern sciences with Arabic and Islamic
studies. He reminded them that they were the only audience of Muslim leaders
left to whom he could appeal, for "in our ancient capitals once so well
known, so rich, so great and so flourishing, nothing is now to be seen
or heard save a few bones strewn amongst the ruins or the human-like cry
of the jackal." More important perhaps than this striking appeal to sentiment
is that Sir Sayyid had by this time developed an approach to politics that
contained the core ideas of Muslim nationalism. Nevertheless, his tone
was mild: "Our great Prophet has enjoined upon us as a sacred duty that
we should wish and act for the good of our co-religionists; therefore,
if we disregard this injunction we are guilty indeed."/15/

We have left Sir Sayyid well on the way to becoming a national figure
and the founder of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental college at Aligarh. Let
us step back to summarize the lessons from the Revolt that Sir Sayyid carried
with him as he assumed this leadership role. They include: (a) a theory
of politics, that is, that British power was indispensable in India and
could not be dislodged. The British, in fact, were the only organized force
that could rule the sub­continent and at the same time preserve law
and order. If the British should for any reason depart, power would gravitate
toward the traditional leaders, and the population would split into hostile
communal groups that would slaughter each other; (b) a theory of national
power, that is, that power depends primarily on the capacity to organize
and the possession of theoretical and practical knowledge, and not on numerical
strength nor the possession of material resources; (c) a theory of society
in which leadership was regarded as resulting primarily from inherited
status or wealth. One of the greatest evils of a time of widespread public
disorder was the consequent disruption of the inherited structure of society;
(d) and, finally, a strategy of Muslim politics whose essential aim would
be reconciliation with the British, and the delaying of political reforms
in India until the Muslims were sufficiently educated to compete with the
more advanced Hindus, especially the Bengali Hindus.

These ideas very largely underlined the movement of Muslim nationalism
in India as it developed after Sayyid's death in 1898.